Frictional Games’ new horror title, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is probably going to give me nightmares. They seem to be celebrating this with a new trailer, which sets the release date for Sepetember 8th, and reminds us why we should be interested in the gloomy spookiness of their game design. Feel vaguely disconcerted, below. (Also, the main site reveals that they are definitely planning a demo, which sounds like a good idea to me.)

Hopefully that voice is the first of your inevitable friend/acquaintance/any other person deaths. I don’t think I could manage to be suitably spooked with too many more lines like “PAY atTENtion DANdal!” Maybe it’s just the name.

I didn´t find penumbra to scary to begin with but after I found out that enemies can´t hit you has long has you keep running.. well after that the scariness was completely gone.
Having high hopes for this one though.
penumbra most certainly got the atmosphere right but the enemies were not scary.

Well, if the dark bits aren’t unique enough for you how about the control scheme/ physics engine?

Also, shouldn’t you be in every other article saying things like, “games with guns, why hasn’t anyone thought of that before?” or “games on computers why hasn’t anyone done that before?”? Its not like every game has to reinvent every single aspect that came before it.

ah, i have nothing against penumbra, i’ve enjoyed what i’ve played so far from the second part of the series, and i might’ve liked this trailer too, if i could see anything besides occasional glimpses of a lantern.

Looks great. I loved the Penumbra games. Played all on your own, in the middle of the night, in the dark (with an owl) they were definitely scary. I thought the second one suffered just a bit from revealing too much of what was going on – in the first game so much is unknown. Also Red was very well done.

Blindly running away from the enemies was perhaps a bit too effective, but a game doesn’t have to kill you a lot to be a good experience. I didn’t kill any enemies in the first game at all, hiding and running worked.

Penumbrta series probably the only true horror games this gen. Unlike Dead Space, Resident evil and other games that rely on cheap jumps and give you all the weaponary and armor of the world . At least penumbra makes you fell helpless a feeling that horror games should have and on top of that the isolated environment and the sounds add alot

@Adamos: I dunno, Dead Space had it’s moments. Most of the good scares, for me, involved the excellent sound design. It made being in room surrounded by horrifying perversions of human flesh sound like a million rusty nails being dragged across a chalkboard made from the faces of dead children. That creeps me out.

I wouldn’t consider it scary, but it did have excellent sound (and visual, but that’s not quite as unusual) design.

The rattles coming from the vents made it seem like there was constantly something scurrying in there. It’s a bit of a shame when you really think about it. Imagine if Dead Space, with its design and million dollar budget, played like Penumbra? Awesomeness incarnate. That, and using the awesome Penumbra physics to interact with the holographic displays would be the bomb.

This is currently the only “commercial” game that I’m looking vaguely forward to. There’s no sign of a new Stalker yet, Thief 4 is likely to suck, no-one is making first-person dungeon crawlers for the PC (no pointless, empty, vapid open-world sections please, just dungeons! The most fun I’ve had lately was with the mobile Doom RPGs!), and I don’t see any sign of a System Shock 3 outside of a fan-produced “SS1 remake” in the SS2 Dark Engine.

But Amnesia is truly an intriguing prospect. First-person, seemingly weapon-less horror. The previews had excellent audio production, solid visuals, and were simply interesting. And there’s not a single other game I can say that about right now.

You must have liked Arx Fatalis then huh? I know I did, unfortunately that was first person dungeon crawling inspired by Ultima that is now really getting old. Amnesia does look really promising (pre-ordered it ages ago) but I think if we want dungeon crawlery we would have to take it into our own hands…

Arx was pretty good… until I got to the towns and completely lost any trace of what to do. Though that was at least five years ago. And most DS dungeon crawlers have similar problems and/or they’re too quirky and Japanese.

Oh god, there’s a game. I could never get very far into Azreal’s Tear due to having a crappy system at the time that could barely handle the engine. But I immediately appreciated the abstract, pseudo-gothic+alien+fuckknowswhat atmosphere that game had. Even thinking about it reveals just how unimaginative and generic so many of today’s games are.

Oh, and if any other old games deserve another “mouselook + highres mod”, Azreal’s Tear is desperate for it.

Azrael’s Tear, yeah…one of my favorite adventures ever! Amazing on the first time through, but on the second playtrhough you’ll try to behave as differently as possible, which disappointingly always leads to the same result since the game veers everything back to one unavoidable path. Try to kill one of the knight templars and he’ll come back to life later on like nothing happened, with his old corpse still lying around in another place!

But still, there’s no game that can beat Azrael’s Tear on atmosphere. And it still feels damn innovative, which is a sad thing to say.
A reason why only a few care about adventures nowadays is because the few innovative titles that the genre offered were ignored by other designers. Nobody followed in their footsteps. You don’t want to play the same thing over and over again, do you?
Amnesia is an innovative exception, thank god. ;)

Oh, btw, Azrael’s Tear does have mouselook, it’s just not automatic. You have to press the right mouse button to look around. And in fire mode you have to push the mouse towards the screen sides…
But high res is definitely needed. While its great that the game looks atmospheric, with truly ruined and filthy environments, the graphics are also very blocky, pixelated. You will have trouble to identify some of the objects. Oh, and the shadows and light reflections are painted on the textures. Not pretty…

Last words about Azrael’s Tear: I also agree, this game needs a retrospective! John, pretty please, could you please write one? ;)
No honestly, this game is in need of some serious attention. And it’s still pretty great today. I think you’d like it.

I can’t really play these games where it is all tension. Expecting something to happen all the time is not healthy for me and when it is too dark on the screen I lean in like a true horror sucker. I don’t mind a level or two of spookiness (Shalebridge Cradle in Thief, The hotel in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines or the underground labs in Stalker) but it can’t be the main course.

All of this Deus Ex talk has really highlighted how strange it is that the games that I think blew a lot of our socks off back in the day and convinced us that the future of PC gaming would forever be moulded on the likes of Deus Ex and Azrael’s Tear etc never actually happened. It’s as if a certain uncrossable level was since secretly agreed upon with regard to interactivity etc and people just got on with upping the graphics, to this day, and going there again would be nothing but awkwardly retro in the wake of all this “accessibility”. And maybe more than highlighting this strangeness your recent features make it more apparent than ever how strong the demand actually is for new games that tap into all this lost greatness among all of us that grew up with it…